I don't know about *MOST* users lives. Most the people I know who use cocaine seem to do so infrequently, and as part of a balanced diet. That seems to be representative of coke users in general; problem users seem to represent 5%-15% of the population, similar to a lot of drugs, though the problematic effects are fairly severe, as is dependence.

Crack cocaine is also a very different drug from base cocaine.

I don't use either, and don't want to.

We shouldn't eradicate them. We should keep thousands of samples from all over the world frozen and maintain a limited breeding population in zoos.

But the wild population? The one that keeps killing HUMANS? We should probably get rid of that. We do a ton of damage to the environment and wipe out a great many species just by existing as is. We can worry about mosquitoes after we solve all the other problems.

Tentatively agreed. I hope this will lead to more people defaulting to encrypted and proxied connections.

Especially if an Ubuntu distro already set up to do this becomes widely used.

Evidence for the presence of Legionella bacteriophages in environmental water samples.

That's why anyone using Bitcoin seriously at the moment should use an exchange to instant sell their Coins for a more stable currency, and buy Bitcoins only exactly when they want to transfer them.

Holding Bitcoins is for speculators.

Does anyone know whether this is likely to have an effect on scales other than the galactic?

For instance, on small chaotic systems.

FUUUUCK.

Tired and forgot to anonymise. It's been nice knowing y'all.

Don't worry. Islam is just as (IMHO more) barbaric than the Old and New Testaments.

While we're posting biased but well sourced links: http://www.wikiislam.net/

Posted AC to reduce the probability of my murder.

Then as a recreational one.

If a game can have a medically recognisable affect, it falls under the purview of those who would regulate your private activities for reasons of their morality.

If this is approved, what's the over/under on how long it takes before it is used as a justification for government interference with a tool that is used to bring pleasure in a manner contrary to a morality?

Probably meant Namecoin; the distributed DNS alternative.

And, just as it is reasonable to expect that sociopaths will spy on you for their own advantage, it is reasonable to expect that sociopaths will steal your stuff if you make it easy.

A predictable percentage of humans qualify for ASPD or whatever they're calling it these days. Anybody trusting a significant number of humans should take appropriate precautions.

What thing did they take that doesn't belong to them? I see that they made unauthorised copies of data, and know that this is a crime in many jurisdictions, but see no thing that has been taken.

I'm shocked by the number of people who take pleasure in Bitcoiners' recent misfortune. A lot of people are putting effort into something they care about, and snide little shits on the internet lol it up.

I don't hold a significant number of Bitcoins (50+change), but I have found them utterly fascinating for the last year, and will read anything published about them. The concept of a low-friction trading platform could revolutionise many industries, and change a lot of people's lives for the better.

It's entirely possible that the spread of Bitcoin will make a few millionaires or billionaires (in USD), but that doesn't seem especially important. All paradigm shifts have moved wealth from those who profit from inefficiencies to those who introduce the more efficient system. Like every single human on the planet, I had the opportunity to mine Bitcoins from the beginning, to buy and hold when they were extremely cheap, but I was too stupid to do so.

If you haven't made a few 10s of thousands of USD from Bitcoin, you were also too stupid to invest in the new technology.

I'm still too stupid to make significant amounts of money from trading, so I voluntarily use Bitcoin as a tool, not expecting my coins to increase in value. It works extremely well.

Would you like to watch a train wreck in slow motion? Would that much human suffering excite you? Do you watch WWII documentaries before lovemaking?

No. Your client is your authority. Unless you have the light client, it will not accept an invalid block. An extremely powerful attacker may be able to confuse a light client.

If any one miner goes offline, they simply cease to process transactions. The blockchain goes on in every other miner's GPU.

Individual coins really are the least important part of Bitcoin. The blockchain is all.